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Sechs Gedichte aus dem Liederbuch eines Malers, Op 36

Introduction

Eric Sams makes the point that when Schumann ceases to make his poetic choices in a subjective way in his 1840 songs the results are rather indifferent; his music had taken fire, as is the case with settings of Heine, Chamisso and Eichendorff, when he dreamed of his Clara and engaged in the struggle to win her hand. When he begins to write songs with texts that he feels he ought to set, there is something of the former mastery that is missing. This is to raise the subject of Robert Reinick in Schumann’s work, as well as in the songs of the young Brahms and Wolf who probably approached this poet, however briefly, as a result of Schumann’s earlier dalliance. Of all the poets that Schumann set in 1840 Reinick is perhaps the weakest—the reputations of Heine, Eichendorff, Kerner, even Chamisso, have remained more or less untouched by time, but who now has heard of Reinick apart from lieder enthusiasts? He was a talented artist and engraver as well as a reasonably skilled versifier, and this at a time when the ‘complete’ artist of this kind was highly valued (another such was Franz Kugler, poet of Brahms’s famous Ständchen, who was also an artist, art-historian and composer). Reinick’s lyrics combined patriotism with a Biedermeier kind of folkish (and specifically Rhenish) lyricism that seemed quintessentially German at a time when politics were slowly but surely moving in an increasingly nationalistic direction. But even this kind of patriotism was old hat in comparison to the work of Uhland.

There was a side of Schumann that was lost in a subjective day-dream, but there was also a more ambitious part of his personality that planned his career to a fault: thus the lieder of 1840 were self-consciously followed by new chapters: the symphony in 1841 and chamber music in 1842. It is very clear that for all his altruism it mattered greatly to him how he was regarded by the outside world; the careful fostering of the Robert–Clara legend is evidence enough of this. If the works of the left-wing rabble-rouser Heine from Hamburg, and the Catholic Silesian Eichendorff were inspired literary choices on the part of the Saxon Schumann, a poet like Reinick seems like a literary choice selected to befit a composer who aspired to the status of a national figure, someone transcending the state boundaries that had so long served German art with such variety and distinction. Reinick’s poems represented a more central, if rather anodyne and artificial, tradition in the same way that Disneyland’s mythology and the castle of Cinderella may claim to represent the history of a United States without a history of his own. In hymning the Rhine and the Fatherland Reinick steps outside the time-honoured concept of the regional poet and provides lyrics for an emerging Germany that are much more generalized: this is not a real country (at least not as yet) but rather a concept—Germany united by cosy religiosity on the banks of the Rhine, the mighty river in itself symbolic of the nation and a source of legend. In this kind of fairy-tale land all is sweetness and light ‘mit Lust und Liedern’; lovers always become wives, and the elves play their part in revealing to the poet that what he needs above all is a pure-of-heart German girl. Of course Reinick was not the only poet to write on these topics in this way, but his Gedichte had early success partly because of the appealing and atmospheric drawings that went along with them.

Recordings

The award-winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake returns to Schumann with performances of the two contrasting Liederkreis (‘song-circle’) cycles to texts by Heine and Eichendorff. Also included are the Sechs Gedichte aus dem Liederb ...» More

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

Graham Johnson’s monumental and triumphant complete Schumann Songs edition comes to an end with this eleventh disc, featuring Hanno Müller-Brachmann. A devoted lieder singer who has performed with some of the world’s greatest pianists, Brachmann i ...» More

No one could better illustrate Reinick’s essential conservatism and his desire to create a picturesque, old-fashioned Germany of the imagination than the poet-painter himself: the drawing of the church and the emerging worshippers, the great river in the distance with a sail boat just discernible, the humble kneeling supplicants, the old castle in the distance built on commanding heights that overlook the Rhine. All of this is described in the poem itself and it would be interesting to know which came first—poem or drawing. It would be difficult to place the drawing in time; some of the clothing seems of the early nineteenth century but there is a deliberate timelessness here, as one may find in a quasi-sixteenth-century production of Die Meistersinger. In truth Reinick depicts some kind of idealized Germany, a dream coloured by the medieval architecture along the river’s banks where the same people, good and pious Germans all, have gone about their business since time immemorial. The resumption of building work to complete the great Cathedral of Cologne, after a hiatus of hundreds of years, is very much in the spirit of the times. The poet asserts in this poem that life on the banks of Father Rhine is a mirror of the mood of the whole of Germany.

In this undemanding song from July 1840 the key is a bright and confident D major, and the marking is Mässig geschwind. Schumann constructs a breezy tune which is partly hymn and chorale, a folksong of his own and remarkably similar to tunes that were advertised by scholars as the real thing some decades later. The accompaniment in genial, chugging quavers is enriched by counter-melodies for the voice in the pianist’s left hand; these suggest the sound of duetting horns, the outdoor instrument of the hunt in the nearby forest and rich in the echoes of history and folksong. In bar 10 the progress of the ship down river occasions a canon between voice and piano as if the boat were trailing a melody in its wake as it proceeds through the water. The poem is in six strophes. The composer is reasonably inventive in varying the melody for each with only the music for verses 1 and 5 (actually the most memorable melody of the song) being the same. For the second verse the composer invents a four-bar vocal phrase that descends into the watery depths and which we hear twice in a row. The third and fourth strophes create the central musical panel of the song. For the sound of the chapel organ described in the third verse the composer temporarily abandons the counterpoint of horn-calls in favour of ecstatically pulsating quavers enriched by internal suspensions that support a vocal line, new music this, that lies unexpectedly high, and rather awkwardly, in the stave. This fervent outburst with a racing heartbeat brings to mind Süsser Freund from Frauenliebe und -leben. For the fourth strophe this music of hopeful transcendence continues, now in a lower tessitura. After the recapitulation of the opening of the fifth strophe (where the idea of mirroring something—‘spiegelt recht’—is admirably conveyed by the left-hand horn figures) the composer gives us a nationalistic paean (where the chordal movement from I to IV gives the music a sense of plagal piety) which is stirring, albeit somewhat uncomfortably so. The extended twelve-bar postlude softens any momentary impression of jingoism—and surely nothing could have been further from Schumann’s mind than the eventual military consequences born of such national pride. It seems as if the composer is here following the progress of the little vessel, not yet a battleship, that we have heard about in the second verse and which now disappears from sight. We could also hear in this music the gradual disappearance of an idealistic dream, as if the composer himself knew that Reinick’s heady optimism was as yet simply a poetic conjuring trick. This optimism seems bound to disappear like the ‘eitel Schaum’—the drift of foam that is blown away with the morning sun at the end of Aus alten Märchen, one of the most famous numbers in Dichterliebe, and another song that describes an elusive ‘land of delight’. The cause of German unification was rolling slowly and inexorably forward but it would be another thirty years before it would be actually achieved.

This is an enchanting miniature on a single page of picturesque music (although the poet chose not to illustrate the poem itself). The composer was partial to the idea of elopement having considered this as a possible solution to his problems with Clara’s father (cf ‘Wenn durch die Piazzetta’ from Myrten). Here he sets only three of Reinick’s five verses (the other two are included in a setting by the young Hugo Wolf in 1883) and as far as Schumann is concerned this proves to be an elegant sufficiency. All is intrigue and nocturnal secrecy with the first two bars of the song given over to an introduction where the spread chord in the right hand imitates the sound of a serenading guitar while a semiquaver triplet ornaments an open fifth in the bass. This grounded tremor manages to convey helpless impatience—like a steed pawing the ground and longing to gallop away, yet unable to do so until saddled. The composer’s marking of Nicht zu schnell is telling: there is an element of ‘schnell’ in the song certainly—the singer wants to make a quick getaway—but he must first sing a seductive serenade; thus throughout there is a conflict between a peremptory flight and the more languid art of persuasion. The song is therefore something of an exercise in artful rubato (some of it inbuilt, such as the illustrative fermata on ‘zögerst du?’ in the first verse), music fit for the ongoing fluctuations of hopes and desires.

The first and second musical strophes are identical but with the third, and a pointed change of harmony, some decision seems to have been taken and one feels, perhaps mistakenly, that the lovers are on their way at last. This is wonderful music that is quietly triumphant and excited while being tentative at the same time; those exquisite high notes that seem thrown in the air for ‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Stimme Schall’ seem born of a sharp intake of breath—the need to be discreet and on vocal tip-toe. The final ‘Liebchen, o komm in die stille Nacht!’ is of the utmost tenderness. The sighing two-bar motif (duly repeated) of the postlude speaks of an entrancing fantasy—perhaps here fulfilled, but also perhaps an evaporating dream relinquished with a patient smile by the lovelorn serenader. Like so many characters of this kind in the song repertoire this young man may very well be forced to repeat his song the following night, and the following, for all eternity.

This can be a charming song in the right interpretative hands, despite its weaknesses. The accentuation of the unimportant words ‘Als’, ‘Wie’, ‘Da’ and ‘Daß’ in bars 5, 7, 9 and 11, is irritatingly inept and somewhat surprising. It is as if the composer has invented a tune that had to be made to fit the words at all costs. It is also a strophic song and we hear the same music three times (as is arguably appropriate for the same girl presented in three different roles in the poet’s life) apart from a slightly more triumphant coda that seems to celebrate the final union of man and woman after a long courtship. Schumann’s sympathy for, and identification with every aspect of this scenario goes without saying, but three repetitions of this pleasant but unexceptional music is entirely sufficient.

The four-bar introduction (the marking is Einfach, innig, the time signature 6/8, the tonality C major) introduces the idea of man and woman in a way that was prefigured in Süsser Freund from Frauenliebe und -leben. In that song the presence of the husband, indeed his speaking voice, is suggested by the shift of the accompaniment’s tessitura into the bass clef as well as cello-like obbligato lines in the piano-writing. We never hear the husband singing but the piano accomplishes that task on his behalf. The accompaniment of Nichts Schöneres provides a less ambitious duet but the sighing motif (E–D–A) in the second bar of the introduction (treble clef) seems to represent femininity; this is immediately answered in playful spirit by the same notes an octave lower and concealed within the piano’s alto register. Thus the composer achieves a colloquy of a kind between the sexes, recognition and instant response, that signifies something like love at first sight. In the postlude this echoing of one phrase by another is intensified by taking place one voice on top of another instead of at a more decorous distance of two quavers, the marriage a fait accompli.

The pervasive staccato writing is illustrative of the pulsating heartbeat and foot skipping in gleeful anticipation. In bars 11–12, at ‘Schönres sollte sein’, the contrary motion of the vocal line (the falling phrase F–E–D–C–B) with the rising line of the bass in the accompaniment (D–E–F–F sharp–G) is a simple but perfect musical metaphor for the convergence of twain. This is one of the poems in Reinick’s collection that does not have an accompanying illustration. There is some indication that the source of this poem as far as Schumann was concerned was not the 1837 version of the poems but the Deutscher Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1836, where Nicht Schöneres appears on p.155. In the same important little book are pre-first edition appearances of Eichendorff’s Im Walde (to be set as Op 39 No 11) and Lenau’s Die Sennin and Einsamkeit (Op 90 Nos 4 and 5). At this time of his life Schumann’s reading was assiduous and in the very thick of modern literary creativity.

The picture that Reinick has provided for this poem is beautifully drawn, and it is a much better illustration of the words than Schumann’s song. The young man in medieval garb in the bottom right-hand corner of the picture leans dispiritedly against a rampart outside the city gates. He has been lured out of his low-ceilinged medieval house by the wonderful spring sunshine and the seasonal sap is rising. He looks longingly and despairingly at the array of beautiful (but modestly attired) girls who are working in the fields, but in this age of chaperones and enforced purity (we can see church spires in the distance) he has no chance of love. In this hopeless situation the sunlight seems painful in is beauty.

The clue to Schumann’s setting is the marking Im Volkston. He is determined to write a folksong and this is the text chosen for the purpose. As such the text is not to be taken too seriously and the composer opts not to make a character study of the mournful young man of Reinick’s drawing. Instead the music is in the major key and the singer sounds remarkably sanguine; he is after all and to all intents and purposes singing a folksong which is hardly a personal expression of his feelings. This is as near as Schumann got to popular song and the song was indeed popular: it was associated with the Swedish nightingale—Jenny Lind—a singer whom Schumann admired and who sang this number in such a way, the composer himself said, that one could feel the sunshine on one’s back as she sang it. She is said to have sung the song on her deathbed when a ray of sunlight fell into the sickroom.

Schumann was in a particularly good mood when writing this song in August 1840 (only a month or so to wait for his wedding) and in the margin of the autograph we can read: ‘As I wrote this there was radiant sunshine—in my life too.’ The repeat of the phrase ‘Die allerschönsten Mädchen’ (bars 19–22) is the composer’s own, as if he can scarcely believe the marital pleasures that are in store for him. In short, Schumann was of a mind to write a happy, elated song and he does so with that astonishing melodic gift—the common touch that would have enabled him in another more venal century to write big-tune movie themes. That much of the song is based on a simple ascending arpeggio is a wonderful example of how memorable Schumann could be using the most simple of materials. Only at the end of the song with its rueful little vocal postlude (the hushed repeat of ‘O Sonnenschein!’) do we catch a glimpse of Reinick’s day-dreaming protagonist, love locked out.

It is curious that Schumann seems to have been influenced by another setting: An den Sonnenschein by Heinrich Marschner (1795–1861), Hofkapellmeister in Hanover, was published in the influential almanac Orpheus for 1840 (published at the end of 1839). The song by Marschner has very similar rhythms to Schumann’s, and the phrase ‘O Sonnenschein’ is similarly constructed on notes taken from the arpeggio in the tonic-key. But Schumann writes a real tune and Marschner’s seems impoverished by comparison; Schumann’s song is heartfelt (albeit in slightly the wrong way for the poem) whereas Marschner’s rather longer offering seems merely note-spinning. It is perfectly possible to see Schumann in this setting teaching the pompous older composer a lesson, or at least giving him a pointer as to the future of lieder.

And once again I thought of my beloved, Whom till then I had seen but in dreams; I was drawn out into the bright night, I had to wander through silent valleys: Then suddenly The valley began to gleam Eerily, like a hall full of ghosts.

The river and winds whistled together a dance melody With a hissing and a roar. A fleeting throng came rushing by From rocks and valleys, bushes and waves, And in the moonlight, Like a white ring, The elves began to dance their rounds.

And I heard in their midst an airy maiden, The Queen of the Elves, begin to sing: ‘Leave your heavy earthly body! Leave all foolish earthly things! Only in moonlight Can true life be found! Eternity only in floating dreams!

I am she you’ve often seen in dreams, I am she you’ve often hymned as your love, I am the Queen of the Elves, You wanted to see me—your wish is fulfilled! You shall now be mine For evermore, Come, come dance with me in our fairy circle!’

They were fluttering and flying all around me now, The dawn wind blew, and I recovered. Farewell now, O Queen of the Elves, For now I shall choose another love; Without deceit and wiles, And pure of heart, There must be one out there for me!

This is definitely the longest and most ambitious of the Reinick songs, and the poem is accompanied by the most ambitious and fanciful of the poet’s drawings. Once again the narrator of the poem is to be found in the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing—a small figure on this occasion dwarfed by the magical goings-on in the cleft of a deep ravine where a host of faery spirits dance in the spray of a waterfall (although this detail is not to be found in the poem itself). The poem is inset on the drawing, as was Reinick’s practice, and even the borders of the box containing the words are decorated with magical insects and menacing hobgoblins. Reinick generously grants himself a dispensation that is not accorded to other poet-victims of the Lorelei in her various manifestations (in this case the Queen of the Elves): he escapes to tell the tale, suitably chastened and determined to abandon thoughts of alluring and dangerous women in favour of a pure Biedermeier model of perfect propriety. This sounds rather like an elaborate metaphor for the poet waking up from a disturbingly erotic dream: once the dreamer has been released from his sexual tension with nature’s help, a hand less consumed by guilt than his own, he decides that he must banish such febrile thoughts in favour of true love … at the very least, the cynic may suppose, until the following night. The use of the word ‘Genesung’ (‘cure’ or ‘convalescence’) is significant; this implies an illness (or what Victorians referred to as ‘pollution’), or at the very least a bad habit that needs to be severely curbed.

A poet like Heine would have scorned Reinick’s prissy voyeurism, his desire both to have his cake and eat it in permitting himself to enter the faery grotto, only to escape unscathed. On the other hand Reinick’s scenario for this poem seems to have been inspired by the spiteful phantasms of Heine’s Mein Wagen rollet langsam. In that case the poet is dreaming of a specific, probably duplicitous, girlfriend; Reinick’s poem on the other hand makes clear that he has not yet met the girl of his dreams and is still waiting to do so. Schumann’s lively and detailed response to Reinick’s text shows that he understands all too well the ongoing struggle between sacred and profane love. Only a few months from his wedding day (the song dates from July 1840) he has a very special reason to keep himself on the straight and narrow; this is a man who knew all about the smiles and wiles of the opposite sex, girls infinitely more available to him than the coveted Clara. Schumann’s music draws from real youthful indiscretions; one wonders whether the same could be said of the well-brought up and religiously observant Reinick.

This is one of those songs where Schumann expects the performers somehow to turn the screw of tension tighter during the performance: the marking is ‘In the beginning not too fast, and then gradually livelier’. The poem is divided into five stanzas of seven lines each. The music begins with a soulful Andante very much in the mood of Du bist wie eine Blume (No 24 of Myrten, Op 25). After only four lines of poetry the narrator is already out of the house, propelled into the countryside on a nocturnal errand. These are set to six two-bar phrases, ABAB, followed by two further phrases, CD, one ascending the stave, the next descending. This melody will dominate the first half of the song and the first third of it (AB) will make a re-appearance at the end. Within three further lines the poet has reached the shining valley which glitters like a ghostly hall and the music moves from the home key of G major to E minor.

In embarking on the poem’s second strophe we now reach the Mendelssohnian part of the song and immediately recognize the influence of the composer of the Overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream or such a song as Neue Liebe, a Heine setting where the queen of the fairies passes by in the forest—presaging either new love or the poet’s death. There is nothing quite like this accompaniment anywhere else in Schumann: semiquavers oscillate in close quarters between the hands and make an unusual shimmering effect aided by piquant discords—A naturals squashed against A sharps, G naturals against G sharps too, gently jabbing between the pianistic cracks and adding a sense of menace to the dance of the spirits, a shining circle of elves. The vocal melody, although accompanied in completely different harmony and style from the opening, is actually the same ABABCD of the first verse. Immediately these supernatural dancers are mentioned the composer directs his performers to get faster and faster. The word ‘Reigentanz’ sets the piano off in a spirited dance-like interlude of four bars, a whirring effect that is again unique in Schumann’s songs.

The poem’s third strophe seems to be set to the same melody yet again, and once again differently harmonized. In fact we hear only AB before the tune diverges into new melodic territory. The semiquavers bristling between the hands have introduced the Queen of the Elves and the new tune is her solo and created in her honour. In the section beginning ‘Laß ab von dem schweren irdischen Leib!’ we might claim to hear the rumbling of timpani and a ghoulish left-hand melody in the bassoon. After four bars the music moves, with change of key-signature, into an even more exultant, and frantic, E major, all in a forte dynamic. This music lacks the lightness for delicate and transparent fairies (Mendelssohn’s speciality); instead we have a stomp rather more suitable for a troupe of none too well-inclined dervishes whirling at the behest of a pagan goddess. The Queen’s solo aria—all new musical material and suitably menacing—is a substantial part of a song that could easily be performed as a duet, although I have never heard it as such.

At the beginning of the fourth strophe the Queen nails her colours to the mast: ‘Ich bin’s, die in Träumen du oft gesehen … Ich bin es, die Elfenkönigin.’ The very statement of her name is supposed to work like a spell (cf Eichendorff’s ‘Du bist die Hexe Loreley’ in Waldesgespräch, Op 39 No 3) that signals eternal servitude or a death sentence. ‘You shall now be mine / For evermore’, she sings, ‘Come, come dance with me in our fairy circle!’. These latter words are conveniently framed in D major enabling a V–I return to the G major of the opening (with a change of key-signature) for the poem’s last strophe. Tempo I is Schumann’s requirement, and the familiar tune (or at least the AB part of it) is now accompanied in much more leisurely quaver triplets. Dawn has arrived to bring the poet to his senses, danger evaporates, but we might also come to the conclusion that he has woken up in his own bed covered with morning dew after a bad but exciting dream. The blood has quickly drained out of the music; after four expansive and somewhat detumescent bars the music recovers its energy: for ‘Fahr wohl nun, du Elfenkönigin’ the tempo marking is suddenly Allegro and the key is once again E major—we are not going to end this song in the tonality in which it began. Sensuality has been replaced by clean-as-a-whistle common sense—this is a kind of boy scout’s march, music for a poet who, rescued by the skin of his teeth from terrible seduction, vows never to have another dirty thought in his life. The emphasis is on purity and the word ‘rein’. Of course this ending trivializes the whole song that at this point turns into a moralizing ditty, as if Reinick wished to rap all young men over the knuckles who were tempted to go down to the dell, or even the bottom of the garden, to play with the fairies. Schumann’s four-bar postlude is made of a completely new musical idea—prancing staccato quavers of a special glee—it is as if the composer is patting himself on the back: ‘Poor Reinick is still on the look-out for the love of his life, but I have already found her.’ The piano’s three final chords dismiss the entire fantasy as if directing us not to take the whole farrago of nonsense too seriously.

And once again I thought of my beloved, Whom till then I had seen but in dreams; I was drawn out into the bright night, I had to wander through silent valleys: Then suddenly The valley began to gleam Eerily, like a hall full of ghosts.

The river and winds whistled together a dance melody With a hissing and a roar. A fleeting throng came rushing by From rocks and valleys, bushes and waves, And in the moonlight, Like a white ring, The elves began to dance their rounds.

And I heard in their midst an airy maiden, The Queen of the Elves, begin to sing: ‘Leave your heavy earthly body! Leave all foolish earthly things! Only in moonlight Can true life be found! Eternity only in floating dreams!

‘I am she you’ve often seen in dreams, I am she you’ve often hymned as your love, I am the Queen of the Elves, You wanted to see me—your wish is fulfilled! You shall now be mine For evermore, Come, come dance with me in our fairy circle!’

They were fluttering and flying all around me now, The dawn wind blew, and I recovered. Farewell now, O Queen of the Elves, For now I shall choose another love; Without deceit and wiles, And pure of heart, There must be one out there for me!

You clouds that hasten eastwards To where my loved one lives, All my wishes, hopes and songs Shall go flying on your wings, Shall lead you, Fleeting messengers, to her, That the chaste child Shall faithfully think of me!

If morning dreams still lull her asleep Drift gently down into her garden, Alight as dew in the shadows, Strew pearls on flowers and trees, So that if my sweetheart Passes by, She shall see all the joyous flowers Bud in even brighter splendour!

And at evening, in calm and silence, Sail away to the setting sun! Paint yourselves in purple and gold, Immersed in the sea of bright fire, Lightly swinging Like little ships, That she might think You are singing angels.

And well might my thoughts be angels, If my heart were as pure as hers; All my wishes, hopes and songs Shall go flying on your wings, Shall lead you, Fleeting messengers, to her, The chaste child, I think of all the time!

Hugo Wolf set this text rather beautifully in 1883 but Schumann has the edge in terms of sheer, glorious melody—unaccountably moving considering its construction on more or less adjacent notes of the scale. This is one of his big tunes (like Stille Tränen Op 35 No 10 or Mondnacht Op 39 No 5) that one can go on hearing again and again—as indeed we do in this very instance. This principal melody has an extraordinary span: from the middle of the stave it climbs to the heights before wafting down in various stages to a sixth below its starting point—four bars of open-hearted bliss, four bars of a musical idea that seems absolutely right for the song’s title—a message of love spread across the heavens as if it were a marriage proposal flagged from an aeroplane. The voice is shadowed by the piano in right-hand octaves while the harmony is filled up with euphonious thirds and sixths provided by the left. This happy idea encompasses the first and second lines of the poem and might be referred to as the A theme; it is promptly repeated in bars 5–8 where it is set to the poem’s third and fourth lines. It must be stated however that the tempo marking of Adagio is completely unrealistic in terms of any usual understanding of that term; this music, high for a low voice, low for a high, must move in a beautiful arch of sound like clouds moving across the sky. Only an Andante can provide such fluidity in this instance, and we also have to consider such practicalities as the singer’s breath. One comes to the conclusion that for Schumann the word Adagio was every bit as much about a seriousness of mood and inner calm as it was about actual speed.

After the luxurious theme A, an F major (in the original key) melody ending in the dominant (C major), we have a luxuriant sequence: bars 9–10 introduce a piano figuration that begins in C minor with an upward jump of a sixth and then descends in stately dotted rhythms that unfurl down the stave; this sumptuous fragment of melody, more of a figuration really, is enriched by bass-clef harmony and enlivened by a touch of imitative counterpoint—the overall effect is one of heady rapture balanced on a groundswell of visceral emotion. This tune which we might name theme B is immediately taken up for the voice (the poem’s fifth line). Then the piano transposes theme B sequentially, effectively a fourth higher (bars 13–14) and as B flat7 harmony yields to G7 we hear the voice with the same tune transposed into C major. Line six of the poem (bars 15–16 with upbeat) is thus set to the same melody, a major third higher than we have heard it sung for the first time in bars 11–12. This music of aspiration is heady stuff, the singer and his audience feel themselves ascending as if spiralling upwards into ever greater heights of expressive devotion. All of this teeters on the borders of sentimentality but this trap is somehow avoided by the sheer quality of the musical material.

With these two tunes in hand, themes A and B, Schumann has all he needs to conjure a song like this—playing one off against the other. The poem’s second strophe begins with a two adjacent appearances of theme A (8 bars) ending once again in the dominant. Theme B now begins in the elevated regions of an A flat7 chord with a pull towards D flat major that is adroitly avoided by slipping into an F7. The music goes on flattening in this way in successive sequences, as if it were languidly stretching out on a couch in a long-limbed pose of unabashed sensuality and with ever-increasing abandon. The high point of the song in terms of tessitura is the high G (in the original key) of ‘All die fröhlichen Blüten’, where theme B is built on a C7 chord. This in turn leads back to F major for another repeat of theme A for the poem’s third verse and further transformations of theme B. Only at the beginning of the final verse (‘Ja, wohl möchten es Engel sein, / Wär mein Herz gleich ihrem rein’) does Schumann provide new musical material, admittedly still derived from theme B, that winds up the main part of the song in preparation for a page of coda. For these sixteen bars Schumann plunders and recycles Reinick’s words for the first strophe, beginning at the third line—‘All meine Wünsche, mein Hoffen und Singen’. These are set to sequences derived from theme B (just when we had been expecting yet another appearance of theme A). After four bars theme A does indeed reappear while the composer rearranges the poet’s words and adds the phrase ‘Zu der Züchtigen’ (duly repeated) to a vocal peroration that sails over the top of the stave (at ‘Hinzulenken’—there is an alternative version for high voice that can manage a high B flat in the original key) before calming down and turning inwards for a meditative coda. This is the kind of dreamy postlude that has brought many a Schumann lied to a conclusion and where neither of the song’s themes is evident. There was never better illustration of Schumann’s ability to make the most of two melodic ideas where he gets the fullest value out of their every transformation and thematic juxtaposition—indeed the continual reappearance of these tunes is in itself an indication of the obsessive devotion that is at the heart of some of Schumann’s most memorable music.

You clouds that hasten eastwards To where my loved one lives, All my wishes, hopes and songs Shall go flying on your wings, Shall lead you, Fleeting messengers, to her, That the chaste child Shall faithfully think of me!

If morning dreams still lull her asleep Drift gently down into her garden, Alight as dew in the shadows, Strew pearls on flowers and trees, So that if my sweetheart Passes by, She shall see all the joyous flowers Bud in even brighter splendour!

And at evening, in calm and silence, Sail away to the setting sun! Paint yourselves in purple and gold, Immersed in the sea of bright fire, Lightly swinging Like little ships, That she might think You are singing angels.

And well might my thoughts be angels, If my heart were as pure as hers; All my wishes, hopes and songs Shall go flying on your wings, Shall lead you, Fleeting messengers, to her, The chaste child, I think of all the time!